BANGALORE: Hardware manufacturers, in a seminar, raised their concerns over the external factors that adversely effect their efforts in maintaining uptime in businesses. According to them, power related problems were the most common of the concerns. Some of the other major factors that have been effecting business uptime are irregular connectivity, terrorist attacks, political instability like bandhs and curfews.

The members of the industry were speaking at a Manufacturers Association of Information Technology conference titled "Designing Uptime into Your Business", which concluded in Bangalore on Thursday. At the end of the day maintaining a continuos trend of uptime in business was stressed at the conference.

Various experts from IT telecom companies came up with suggestions and ideas in this forum.

RV Deshpande, Minister for Large and Medium Industries, Government of Karnataka, spoke on the importance of enhanced infrastructure, supply of proper quality and quantity of uninterrupted power supply to the industries. He said a healthy power supply can enable the IT industries, especially the hardware industries in delivering a high quality product line.

Venkat Kedlaya Chairman MAIT Southern Region emphasized on the importance of business continuity planning to effectively manage and control the IT infrastructure thereby improving the overall operational reliability.

Kedlaya also clearly demarcated disaster categories into natural (earthquake, floods, hurricanes, fire etc) and intentional (hacking, nuclear attacks and infrastructure failures including power, hardware and software failure). He stressed on the importance and the need of disaster recovery in managing business continuity.

Kedlaya informed that Business Continuity Processing involves asset identification and classification, risk analysis and management, emergency response mechanism and communication review.

V Ravichandar, CEO, Feedback Marketing Services Ltd., highlighted the detrimental effects of unscheduled power supply on the IT industry and emphasized that power cuts were a prime reason for downtime in India. During his presentation he also brought out the fact that 60 percent of the Indian IT firms experience power failure atleast once a month and as a result of power failures. He firmly emphasized the need to increase investments in uptime planning.

Nihar Rao, CTO OM Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance Co., stated that 43 percent of companies that undergo disasters never reopen and 29 percent of them close within two years. He also forewarned during his study that one out of the 500 data centers would experience a severe disaster.